The Romance of Commerce and Culture
Fox, Richard Wightman
effective hidden persuader of all. As early as the turn of the century, Allen notes, advertising theorists began to argue that the point of an ad was not to convey information about a product...
...they help us explain our world...
...Walter Paepcke and other well endowed philanthropists, only some of whom share Paepcke's commercial interest, bask in the reflected glow of intellectual and artistic celebrities...
...But we also want to know whether consumers were in fact as passive as ad- vertising theorists, and Allen, think they were, or whether they remained in any sense active agents in the realm of con- sumption...
...HOWARD KAPLAN has written for The Vil-lage Voice, The Atlantic Monthly,and The American Spectator...
...But that does not prove that they scampered over the ramparts with- out meeting any resistance...
...But the account cries out for a reconstruction of Paepcke's stance...
...But these subjects are only loosely tied to each other and to the first part of the book...
...like the author, he's out to score big...
...rusted machine parts .9 . . like the remnants of a forgotten civilization...
...We want to know why Paepcke's REVIEWERS FRANCIS SCHUSSLER-FIORENZA teaches theology at The Catholic University of America...
...Yet none of it much qual- ifies as tip-roaring stuff.9 Early on, ap15 June 1984:379...
...Miller shows us its ultimate unreality...
...Felix, thirty-one-year- old narrator of T.9 Boyle's Budding Prospects, fails in...
...The reputation of business had taken a nosedive in the Depression...
...In its jarring jux- tapositions and startling rearrangements of line, color, light, and shadow, modern graphics represented the modern experi- ence of dislocation itself...
...these men must now make it on their own...
...To their credit T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, and George Bernard Shaw stayed home...
...But once linked to the commercial marketplace, abstract art also presented a world of goods: commodities that simul- taneously appeared to solve the problem of flux and yet continuously reopened it...
...Consumer articles were touted as solid, objective, real, as substantial answers to modern anxieties...
...He roughs people up for the fun of it...
...The writing itself is chock-full of screen references...
...Boyle, his eye on the action not the players, rations out one or two traits per person...
...Boyle, not without liter- ary scruples, is trying to soften the wham-bam crudities of his comic-strip plot...
...The only thing that links them is Paepcke's interest in them...
...They may both have liked Paepcke and they may both have tried to sell culture to the masses, but their outlooks and histor- ical roles were much more dissimilar than Allen thinks...
...they transcended the conflict between mere interest groups like labor and capital...
...a target mounted.., like an artist's easel...
...Next page, different context, he tosses out this: "I compared myself to . . . James Dean...
...Meanwhile there's plenty of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll to ensure Boyle's success if not Felix's...
...That's about it on Gesh, but don't let the strange name fool you...
...The constant name-dropping is part of a larger habit, almost an addiction: Boyle can't keep away from a simile...
...The goal was to link the consumer's needs, includ- ing his or her anxieties and self-doubts, to the therapeutic realm of goods...
...His books include Saints for Confused Times (Thomas More Press...
...Commodities can be assembled out of old-fashioned as well as futuristic imagery...
...Allen strains his argu- ment to the breaking point when he tries to tell us that Hutchins and Moholy-Nagy were fundamentally engaged in the same enterprise because of their "historical, communal, and metaphysical yearn-ings...
...Rather than build a situation step by step, you blithely drop a name, and the name does the job while you take five...
...But happi- ness for him means more than a fat bankroll...
...It presented a world of everchanging fragments, a kaleidoscope of shifting images, the same world that Conrad, Kafka, and Mann were trying to capture in their fic- tion...
...Of course having seen these folks before in the movies, we can fill in the details ourselves...
...perception about modernist graphics was not more widely shared in the business community...
...The story of his friendship with and support for Moholy-Nagy, who emigrated to Chicago when Nazism shut down the German Bauhaus, is a pathbreaking case study in the twentiethcentury rendezvous between commerce and culture...
...Im- plicit in Allen's data is an argument about Paepcke's paradigmatic place in twentieth-century life: the collector of precious minds as well as precious art, the consumer of any and all ideas as long as they are "great...
...For his international Goethe Festival at Aspen in 1949 Paepcke purchased the services of Albert Schweitzer and Jose Ortega y Gasset for $5000 each, Thornton Wilder for $2500, and numer- ous lesser known academics for $1000 each...
...Venal schemes aside, the above is buzz-name description, and all of us employ it in normal conversation.9 But what in speech amounts to a mildly lazy habit, in fiction looks positively slothful...
...Ironically Allen does very little in the end to elucidate Paepcke's own outlook, the one perspective that might have tied Pot potboiler BUDDINS PROSPECTS: A PASTORAL T. Coraghesmn Boyle Vikin~ $16.95, 333 pp...
...Their world was now beyond their own comprehension, in perpetual flux, a succession of fleeting images...
...Jerpbak, a clean-cut cop, represents the stock Villain.9 Mirror shades are his fear- some prop...
...Modern consumer culture is in part an arena in which great minds sell their image as lofty embodi- ments of inherited wisdom or advanced knowledge...
...The good consumer was the master of images --adept at building and rebuilding his or her own image out of the available pool of fragments...
...It's a cheap lit- tle labor-saving device...
...visionaries like Paepcke devoted vast resources to refurbishing the corporate image...
...the end to make a million at marijuana farming...
...Celebrity is an unstable realm...
...They do ask "Where's the beef...
...By book's end, faithful Felix is ready to accommodate her...
...The good guys are slavering leches, too, but they at least are single.9 Petra, a long- legged arts and craftsy type, is the damsel in distress...
...As early as the turn of the century, Allen notes, advertising theorists began to argue that the point of an ad was not to convey information about a product but to make a subtle, even subliminal, appeal to the self-image of the buyer...
...It was in the nature of com- modities to become rapidly outdated --a welcome development for manufacturers and their salesmen...
...The educated con-sumer would now be one who grasped the relentless maelstrom of modern liv- ing: to be stylish meant to stay informed, one step ahead, at the vanguard of con- sumption...
...Beneath the hip California coating lies old-fashioned melodrama...
...He cheats on his wife...
...clumps of mist.., like balls of hair" --those are all from a single medium-sized paragraph, ran-domly selected...
...Howard ICaplan y , OUR basic potboiler hero has dollar signs in his eyes...
...The best ad- vertisements do not just manipulate us...
...But once he is done with that tale one-fourth of the way into the book, he decides to follow the rest of Paepcke's life story instead of pursuing the connection between advertising and art...
...He does report that Paepcke was an intensely private man and that it was hard to know what he thought...
...Allen is the first writer to obtain access to the Paepcke family papers, and that privileged source allows him to document the fascinating Paepcke-MoholyNagy relationship...
...Marvelous Mary Thron-berry, never much of a draw on the Commonweal: 378 field, becomes a mainstay of the lecture circuit for another season...
...he was a metaphysical absolutist for whom the medieval synthesis was normative...
...They do laud commercials, like the now classic Miller Lite series, that subtly depict the contradictions of consumer culture...
...When Saper's 300- plus-pound mental-defective son goes berserk --a scene played for laughs by the way --Felix is reminded of the rag- ing King Kong...
...The major problem with this book is the direct result of its primary virtue...
...Were other businessmen dense, or did they perhaps realize that advertising could be "modern" while relying on kitsch art like Norman Rockwell' s? There may be more than one way to capture the fleeting character of modern experience and invite the con-sumer onto the treadmill of the modern lifestyle...
...Yet through the commercial itself they become celebrities again, at least temporarily...
...JOHN GARVEY writes a regular column for Commonweal...
...Yet they were also im- plicitly identified as transitory, fleeting solutions...
...Like the Savior at Golgotha, Vogelsang stayed three days...
...He is president-elect of the Catholic Theological Society of America and author of Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (Crossroad...
...RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX is associate professor of history and humanities at Reed College in Portland...
...But he overdoes the fancy-talk by half...
...Advertis- ers could capitalize on the disorientation by packaging a potent array of those images, organizing thefia, to summon up an emotional response to a product...
...Though she lays the priapic hero after proper introductions, her pur- ity of heart is uncompromised: eventu- ally, she says, she wants to have chil- dren...
...Shaw replied that he re- fused to reduce Goethe to an object of conspicuous consumption...
...One page later, survey- ing the damage, Felix feels "as if my life had somehow become confused with a Fellini movie...
...In the Miller ads former athletic celebrities reveal them- selves to be human beings like us --worded about their own dwindling ener- gies, buoyed up by the camaraderie of friends...
...We get, among other things, fistfights, friskings, and pukings, one night in jail, and several in a dive called Shirelle's Bum Steer.9 The protagonist battles fires and" bears and a sleazy blackmailer...
...STEVEN PHILIP KRAMER teaches history at the University of New Mexico...
...Manufactur-ers and their advertisers laid siege to the consumer mind," he tells us...
...That scowling visage, never described, belongs in reality to Nick Nolte...
...As in all melodrama, action is every- thing here...
...The rest of the book takes up a variety of topics in American cultural history, especially the Great Books movement of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler and the development of Aspen, Colorado, as a cultural haven...
...Likewise, the redneck Lloyd Sapers is Warren Oates in overalls...
...Allen should wonder whether we might grant the ob- vious centrality of advertising in modern American life and yet still hold that con- sumers remain rational human beings ca- pable O'f discriminating judgment...
...As purveyors of "culture," corporations stood above the battle...
...Paepcke realized that CCA could"sell itself not as a boxmaker only but as a designer and as the embodiment of good taste...
...No doubt some did...
...Lis- terine, with its invention of the social disease "halitosis," was only one of many companies, that instructed buyers to "suspect yourself first...
...I was ogling Savoy's butt," says Felix, "with all the mendi- cant passion of a Charlie Chaplin, out at the elbows, pressing his nose to a plate- glass window rife with cream puffs and napoleons...
...Modernist graphic art was supremely suited to the task...
...Plainly, Boyle has Hollywood on the brain --Hollywood script deals, that is...
...Allen is far too beholden to Stuart Ewen's Captains of Conscious- ness, which implies that twentieth-century capitalists and advertisers con- spired successfully to reduce Americans to mindless automotons...
...Consumers were no longer considered reasonable shoppers making discriminating judg- ments, but wavering creatures subject to the confusing pressures of modern urban life...
...An adequate view of advertising must do jus- tice to the fact that people make such judgments both about products and ads themselves...
...In fact, Hutchins never went through the modern experience of doubt that lay behind the German Bauhaus...
...Gesh, for instance, one of two sidekicks, is a big bull of a man with a snorting temper to match...
...as Wendy's ad shrewdly suggested...
...One Officer the book together...
...An upstanding old hippie, he smiles as he sinks back to poverty-line limbo...
...we can buy wall phones of fake wood with ornamental bells and cranks for the "country look...
...Walter Paepcke of the Container Corporation of America was the first major executive to grasp the utility of modernist graphics...
...And amiable Felix is the bearded Jeff Bridges...
...Insects will buzz around the colossus, but not I. I take my hat off, and hold my tongue...
...Abstract poster art, developed in Europe in the 1920s by such artists as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and A. M. Cassandre, possessed a shock value that could hold the attention and stimulate the emotions...
Vol. 111 • June 1984 • No. 12
